In Which Our Schedule Is Way Too Busy and It's All My Fault

If there were ten days in a week and 40 hours in a day, Kittygirl would easily fill them all up with activities. She has been doing ballet since she was three. This fall she picked up gymnastics and has excelled. This fall she also joined a newly formed cross country team at her school. Through the Girls on the Run program she ran her first 5k a couple weeks ago. She belongs to both a Brownie troop and a Cub Scout Pack. She has in the past played both soccer and basketball quite well and would love to get back to them. The picture below represents all of her activities. Though she's not currently playing soccer, I threw in the ball to symbolize her desire to go back to that.

Kittygirl was in kindergarten when she was diagnosed with diabetes. She was already a pretty active kid, but her only scheduled activities at the time were ballet (which was only once a week) and Girl Scouts (two afternoons a month after school). We promised ourselves when she was diagnosed that we would not let diabetes hold her back. It didn't have to work that way, but that promise to myself has made it really difficult for me to say no when Kittygirl wants to try something new, even if the schedule addition is impractical.

When Kittygirl was in first grade a dad from her school offered to start a YMCA soccer team for first graders from the school. Kittygirl was eager to join. Ballet was still only once a week at that point, and it didn't seem like a big deal to add one more activity. It worked out fine. Kittygirl loved soccer and the coach declared that she was the best girl he had ever coached.

The team reformed in the spring and Kittygirl continued to play. However, in the fall of second grade ballet class was moving up to two days a week and I told Kittygirl that she would have to stop doing ballet if she wanted to go back to soccer. She chose ballet. That spring it had been announced that Cub Scouts would begin accepting girls as members in the fall. At first we told Kittygirl that she had to leave Girl Scouts if she wanted to join Cub Scouts. However, she really didn't want to leave Girl Scouts and really wanted to try Cub Scouts. We compromised on a trial year with both.

The whole trial year thing turned out to be wishful thinking. Kittygirl thrived in Cub Scouts but still loved Girl Scouts, and the fact is the two organizations offer two different very good things. I was still in favor of choosing just one, but Mr. Engineer convinced me that, since one meets bimonthly right after school and one weekly in the evening there really wasn't any kind of conflict if Kittygirl continued with both.

This summer Kittygirl kept bringing up her desire to do gymnastics. She'd expressed this desire before and even took a class her last year of preschool, but I kept managing to put her off by telling her that she would have to quit ballet to take up an additional activity. Finally she told me she wanted to do gymnastics so much that she was willing to give up ballet. I found out that there was a gym other than the super competitive team gym in town that she could start at, so I reconciled myself to switching from dance mom to gym mom. Then we attended an open house at her long time ballet studio's new building the week after classes started. Kittygirl fell in love with the new studio and asked if there was any chance she could do both. Against my better judgment, I said yes because I love ballet in general and that studio in particular.

In keeping with my theme of saying yes, I also said yes to Cross Country (which this first year was a pretty limited commitment) and to Girls on the Run (which complicated our lives because we had to run straight to ballet after the meetings). Thankfully, both of those ended before ballet ramped up with Nutcracker rehearsals. The one thing I did manage to definitively say no to was to Kittygirl being in the fall ballet show, which would have made both cross country meets and Cub Scout campouts nearly impossible thanks to rehearsals every Saturday.

In contrast to Kittygirl, Squirrelboy has always been more of a one activity at a time kind of person. He danced from age 4 through the fall of his 5th grade year. In the spring of his 5th grade year, with the knowledge that we were planning to homeschool for middle school, he joined a newly formed middle school Ultimate (frisbee) team that grew out of a highly successful homeschool high school team.

He continued with the Ultimate team through middle school, even starting to play with the high schoolers during 7th grade. They would have let him continue this fall despite being back in public school, but the team was transitioning to a a new coach he wasn't excited about, so he decided to step back. The one thing he really wanted to do was be able to go mountain biking semi regularly. The one set of trails is, of course, on the other end of town from both our house and his school. Initially we settled on every Thursday he didn't have a huge load of homework. That worked for all of two weeks, until Kittygirl signed up for dance, which, of course, was on Thursdays.

I still managed to make it work occasionally, but the poor guy hasn't had nearly as much biking opportunity as he hoped for this fall. However, I've gone out of my way including leaving Girl Scouts early to allow him to be part of Journalism Club, which meets once a week after school (of course on the same day of the week as Girl Scouts) so he hasn't been left totally bereft. I've also rearranged my schedule on occasion to allow him to stay after school until 4 to learn more about the editing software the school news team uses, which helps him with his filmmaking skills (this has moved forward to become his primary passion over and above mountain biking).

So what's my advice? I'm really not sure. I don't like the fact that we have an evening commitment 4 days a week along with regular weekend commitments. However, I do like that my kids have the opportunity to pursue their passions. I guess my advice is to know your limits. Despite the craziness of our fall schedule, I have found that I have not been pushed past my limits. If we added one more thing I think I would be. Your limit might be one activity per kid.

When Squirrelboy was a preschooler I read a book on simplicity, and the author's advice was to limit your kids to one weekly art activity and one weekly sport activity. I found this to be an excellent advice and vowed to follow it. I then proceeded to massively break that vow. Plus, I learned pretty quickly that not all activities fit neatly into those two categories anyway. Had this author never heard of scouting? Is ballet a sport, an art, or some of both? If it's both, does it count in just one category of two? If advice like that is helpful to you by all means use it, but I found that it ended up not fitting my family's life at all.

In addition, my advice is to not let your child's disability determine what activity he does. A child in a wheelchair can't play traditional sports, but that doesn't mean he can't play any sports at all. For kids like mine with invisible disabilities you need to help judge whether an activity would be a good fit for them. Hint: it's not necessarily a bad fit just because it presents a challenge. On the contrary, it might be a great opportunity for growth. Don't let your child's diagnosis hold them back. That said, "not holding them back" does not need to equal an activity every single evening. Take it from me, that's doable but not really the best choice.